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A Feminist Kant

By Carol Hay December 8, 2013 7:15 pmDecember 8, 2013 7:15 pm

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

In one of his more memorable essays, “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All,” David Foster Wallace describes a visit to the Illinois State Fair. The friend who accompanies him, whom he calls Native Companion because she’s a local, gets on one of the fair’s rides. While she’s hanging upside down, the men operating the ride stop it so that her dress falls over her head and they can ogle her. After she gets off the ride, Wallace and Native Companion have a heated discussion about the incident. He thinks she’s been sexually harassed and thinks something should be done about it.

Consulting yet another dead white male about the problems of oppression didn’t initially strike me as the best idea.

Wallace asks, “Did you sense something kind of sexual-harassmentish going on through that whole little sick exercise? … this doesn’t bother you? As a Midwesterner, you’re unbothered?” To which Native Companion replies, “So if I noticed or I didn’t, why does it have to be my deal? What, because there’s [harassers] in the world I don’t get to ride on The Zipper? I don’t get to ever spin?” … What’s getting hot and bothered going to do about it except keep me from getting to have fun?” Then, Wallace: “This is potentially key. … The core value informing a kind of willed politico-sexual stoicism on your part is your prototypically Midwestern appreciation of fun … whereas on the East Coast, politico-sexual indignation is the fun. … I’m telling you. Personal and political fun merge somewhere just east of Cleveland, for women.” Native Companion: “They might ought to try just climbing on and spinning and ignoring [them]. That’s pretty much all you can do with [expletive].”

Situations like this are ubiquitous, and hardly the worst thing women have to put up with in a sexist society such as ours. But I’ve grown tired of discussing what’s wrong with the carnies’ behavior. (It’s a textbook case of sexual harassment, and more than enough feminist ink has been spilled explaining why and how this sort of thing is morally unacceptable.) Instead, I want to ask a different set of questions: what is Native Companion obligated to do here? In general, are victims of oppression obligated to resist their oppression?

In short, yes. And the philosophical resources for this claim can be found in a somewhat surprising place: in the moral philosophy of the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

I wasn’t always so optimistic about Kant’s prospects. I first started thinking about these questions while I was in grad school, a feminist who was training to be an analytic philosopher. Analytic philosophers are generally friendly toward Kant (friendlier than many of them tend to be toward feminism, in any case). But most feminist philosophers make no secret of their dislike of him. They rightly decry the horrifically misogynistic things Kant actually said about women (there are some real doozies), and they argue that, among other things, he is committed to a conception of personhood that unfairly and inaccurately privileges our rationality and autonomy over the social, interdependent, embodied, and emotional aspects of our lives. This misrepresentation of human nature encourages us to think about people as fundamentally independent, and this, they argue, leads to the exploitation of those people (usually women) who are responsible for caring for those people who are not independent (children, the elderly, the disabled and infirm — all of us at some point in our lives, really).

Consulting yet another dead white male about the problems of oppression didn’t initially strike me as the best idea. But I’ve now come to think that Kant’s account of what our rational nature is, why it’s valuable, how it can be compromised and deformed, and why it must be fostered and protected, should be of interest not only to feminists, but to anyone who cares about the victims of oppression, harassment, bullying, or abuse.

Kant argues throughout his moral philosophy that what’s distinctive about us as human beings is our rational nature—our ability to set and pursue ends according to reason (or, more colloquially, our ability to figure out what we want, to figure out how to get it, and to ask ourselves whether we should want it). This rational nature, he argues, is what makes us morally valuable and what makes us deserve an important sort of respect.

This respect requires that we always be treated as an end and never merely as a means. As Kant puts it, “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.” We treat people as means whenever we ignore the ends they’ve set for themselves and instead use them for our own purposes. Kantian philosophers typically focus on how this morally impermissible use of another person involves deception and coercion. But Kant’s moral framework can also be used to show what’s wrong with other frustrations of rational nature, including those that pop up under oppression.

Feminists have been discussing the devastating psychological effects of sexist oppression for quite some time. Mary Wollstonecraft and J.S. Mill argued, in the 18th and 19th centuries respectively, that sexist social norms of genteel society and motherhood, combined with sexist legal institutions such as marriage and property, damaged women’s rational capacities by depriving them of equal opportunities with men to develop their talents. Contemporary feminists have continued this discussion in a number of ways. Many focus on what happens when women internalize sexist oppression, when women come to believe in, are weakened by, and are motivated to fulfill, the stereotypes that represent them as inferior. One way to think about these various harms is that they’re instances where oppression has harmed women’s rational nature in some way.

Just as we have a duty to respect others in virtue of their rational nature, we have a duty to respect ourselves.

Of course, Kantianism is hardly the only philosophical framework with the resources to explain what’s wrong with these harms. What sets Kant apart from almost every other thinker in the Western philosophical canon is his ability to make sense of duties to the self, particularly the duty of self-respect. (Most non-Kantian philosophers think of duties as the sorts of things that you can only have to other people, not the sort of thing you can have to yourself.) Kant’s duty of self-respect, first introduced in his 1785 “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals,” is a duty each of us has to recognize the value of the rational nature within us and to respond accordingly. Just as we have a duty to respect others in virtue of their rational nature, we have a duty to respect ourselves.

Without this duty of self-respect, we could explain why someone like Native Companion has a duty to respond to the oppression of other women, simply by appealing a general duty to resist injustice. But we can’t explain why she has a particular duty to resist her own oppression. Given that self-sacrifice is routinely expected of oppressed people in ways it’s not expected of others (think, for example, of the ideal of the self-abnegating mother who unfailingly puts her family’s interests before her own), establishing the duty of self-respect is especially important in these contexts.

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What the marriage of Kantianism and feminism gets us, then, is this. Because we have an obligation to prevent harms to our rational nature, and because oppression can harm our capacity to act rationally, we have an obligation to resist our own oppression. Despite what Kant himself might’ve thought, we know that women’s rational capacities are no different from men’s. Thus we can use Kantianism to explain why women are just as deserving of respect as men and why this respect is incompatible with sexist oppression.

So it looks like Native Companion is wrong. The duty of self-respect demands that she stand up for herself by resisting her oppression. Of course, this isn’t the only duty that’s operative here. The carnies have a duty to stop their immoral behavior; Wallace probably has a duty to stand up for his friend, and certainly has a more general duty to protest injustice; Native Companion has a duty to other women to do what she can to undermine the manifestations of sexist oppression that all women face. But the duty of self-respect under oppression has received considerably less philosophical attention than these other duties.

The most obvious objection to this line of argument is that holding Native Companion responsible for resisting her oppression shifts the moral burden in this situation onto the party who hasn’t done anything wrong—in effect, it blames the victim. But here, too, is a place where the resources of Kantianism are uniquely well-suited to help. In a later work, his 1797 “The Metaphysics of Morals,” Kant expands upon a distinction first introduced in his earlier “Groundwork”: a distinction between perfect and imperfect duties. Unlike perfect duties, imperfect duties aren’t duties to perform specific actions. Instead, imperfect duties are duties to adopt certain general maxims, or principles of action, that can be satisfied by more than one action.

The obligation to resist oppression is this sort of duty: there are lots of things one can to do fulfill it. Native Companion could confront the carnies directly. She could lodge a formal complaint with the fair’s management. We might even think that she actually is resisting her oppression—that by refusing to feel humiliated, refusing to let the carnies dictate when and how she can have fun, and refusing to believe that their sexually objectifying her demeans her moral status in any way—she’s actually resisting her oppression internally. In some cases, there might be nothing an oppressed person can do to resist her oppression other than simply recognizing that there’s something wrong with her situation. This is, in a profound sense, better than nothing. It means she hasn’t acquiesced to the innumerable forces that are conspiring to convince her that she’s the sort of person who has no right to expect better. It means she recognizes that her lot in life is neither justified nor inevitable.

Carol Hay is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and the author of the recently released book “Kantianism, Liberalism, & Feminism: Resisting Oppression.”

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The Stone features the writing of contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. The series moderator is Simon Critchley. He teaches philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. To contact the editors of The Stone, send an e-mail to opinionator@nytimes.com. Please include “The Stone” in the subject field.